State commentary: Strip searches

Can police ever be too careful?

It's not a pleasant story. But given the recent controversies about how some Wisconsin police conduct strip searches, or possibly even cavity searches, it is a thought-provoking one.

In Beloit, the city recently agreed to pay $265,000 to a teenager who alleged he was visually strip-searched by an officer who asked him to prove a bulge in his pants wasn't drugs. In Milwaukee, meanwhile, authorities are now investigating allegations that some cops might have sexually assaulted people while conducting rectal searches.

McKinley's story is a much older one.

While incarcerated at Waupun in the early 1980s, he was forced to undergo visual strip searches that included "an inspection of his anal cavity" before being returned to the prison's so-called "Adjustment Center" after a disciplinary hearing, according to court records. McKinley alleged he was sprayed with mace and assaulted. Department of Corrections employees denied that there had been an assault and argued that any force that was used was the result of McKinley's refusal to comply.

Any physical assault is, of course, a fundamental civil rights violation. Cavity searches that involve penetration always have to be conducted by medical professionals, not police.

The legality of visual strip searches, meanwhile, depends upon where they occur. Police in Beloit were forced to pay because the search took place in public on a street. Such searches are often acceptable, at the same time, if done to people being admitted to jail. But even visual strip searches that don't involve touching, the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has written, are "demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying, unpleasant, embarrassing" and "repulsive" among other things.

Some people, it seems, have a hard time imagining any good reason to do them - including, perhaps, a jury that awarded McKinley $15,000.

The Court of Appeals eventually suggested that amount should be reduced at least somewhat. Because the records are so old, I was unable to determine how much a district court judge gave him in the end. But I do know that was not the last judge he would face.

McKinley was found guilty of a variety of crimes over the years. But his most notorious crime, attempted murder, occurred in October 1987 - several years after he successfully sued the guards at Waupun.

McKinley was being transferred from the Milwaukee County Jail to the Dane County Jail by two sheriff's deputies, James Paradinovich and Stephen Parks. On the way to Madison, he got his hands on a .22-caliber handgun while sitting in the back of a Milwaukee County Sheriff's Department squad car, shot Paradinovich in the neck, tried to shoot Parks, and briefly escaped.

I wrote about that case when it went to trial and have never been able to forget it, partly because of the fact McKinley, it would turn out, was given the gun by a third sheriff's deputy he'd befriended back at the jail, Gale Coleman. And partly because of another fact I found astonishing - but one that is true and explains why cops and guards have to be so careful about what suspects keep in their pants and sometimes in other places.

McKinley had hidden the four-inch-long gun - along with $40 in cash and some handcuff keys - in his rectum.

Parks testified in an affidavit that they didn't find any of it because standard operating procedure at the jail prohibited thorough strip searches.

He and Paradinovich were eventually awarded $5.3 million from the county. LaRon McKinley, meanwhile, got both a long prison sentence and a permanent spot in the minds of police officers who aren't just imagining the sorts of dangerous things some criminals can keep secreted away.